updated 02:20 pm EDT, Fri June 25, 2010

Blu-ray Disc Association approves BDXL format

The Blu-ray Disc Association on Friday finalized its proposed BDXL format for Blu-ray discs. The advance will allow up to 128GB of storage space on write-once and rewritable discs. BDXL will be aimed mostly at video producers and others who need to write a large amount of data to a removable backup, with triple-layer 100GB rewritable (RE) and write-once (R) discs as well as quadruple-layer 128GB R discs.

New disc readers need to be designed to read BDXL discs, though these will be backwards compatible with today's 25GB and 50GB Blu-ray disc formats.
Manufacturers can now obtain license info and applications for the new standard. The Association hasn't given out an estimated time for when the first BDXL hardware will ship.

Video backup

It would be useful for those of us in the video production industry to be able to back up all the raw files of a production to a single disc. Sony has been promoting backup to BluRay for some time but 25 or 50 GB still isn't enough - 128 GB would be handy. Back up the FCP capture scratch folder and ancillary files in one hit. I wonder how much they are and what their longevity is.

Sweet!

(Drool) But I want 128GB backups now! Really looking forward to these being available. I wonder if this new format is driven by the 3D movies coming out, needing twice the storage to handle the video stream for each eye.

Boy, I sure wish I could buy a Mac with one of these BluRay burners. It would be nice to have some native Mac software support for working with the format, which won't really happen until the burners and readers are stock equipment. I understand that Apple is focusing on mobile, and optical drives are on the way out in mobile, but some of us are still using desktops, and optical media still have their place in that space.

Waste of time energy and effort

What a waste of money time and effort to bring new bluray standards in the market when the all new format is coming in several years reaching all the way to 25TB per disc and which is even cheaper to make then todays most expensive BD disk. Even todays harddrive is nt more than 2TB bt the new technology has revealed 10TB HDD by Hitachi which is still way lesser than the new format which will revolve tomm in just one small disc and cheaper than the any thing else in the market :D